What's a Polite Word for Depression?

The

department store down the street from me in Nara abruptly closed last week—and the construction workers dismantling it seemed happy not to be in the position of the salarymen they hear about who get up every morning, go to the park in coat-and-tie and return home at 7 p.m. to a family that doesn't know daddy has been laid off. Unemployment recently hit a postwar high of 5%, and my Japanese friends regularly point out "For Sale" signs proliferating outside luxury houses, or talk of college-age kids who actually want to work for the government (which offers greater job security than the private sector).

And yet, for a longtime foreign resident in this ancient capital, what's most striking about Japan's current economic depression is not how visible it is, but just the opposite. The stores appear as jam-packed as they ever were, with customers dropping unfathomable sums on handbags, and the flights to California and Hawaii are still booked up three months in advance (even if people are drawing on funds they set aside for a rainy day). Driving through Atlanta five years ago, while it was basking in its pre-Olympic boom, I saw broken windows, shuttered stores and people walking lost and disenfranchised down streets without cars or telephones; in recessionary Japan, by contrast, most of the people I see seem to be well dressed, on their way to somewhere and exulting in Ichiro's success in America's big leagues.

"Seem" is the operative word in that sentence, of course, and many a visitor will tell you that Japan has mastered the art of not appearing to be worried by burying its collective head in the sand; last year alone, after all, the Nikkei index lost a quarter of its value. The maintenance of an upright, even upbeat public face is part of what has led generations of outsiders to talk of "inscrutability" (a nice word for insincerity) and to ask if smiles, in this proud and often aggressive country, are not just a way of keeping tears at bay.

Even now, I often feel, in the Land of the Rising Sun, as if I'm living in some overlit amusement arcade, in which every other car is called "Sunny" and even the supermarkets style themselves "Sun Plazas." In 1987, when I first arrived in Japan, an American teacher of English in Kyoto told me that when she asked her students to choose an adjective with which to describe themselves, she had to ban the use of the word "cheerful," or else every girl in class would select it. Accentuating the positive is an article of faith here.

But what takes longer to realize about the regulated optimism in Japan is that it may not be Panglossian so much as simply pragmatic: the Japanese I know see happiness not as something to be pursued, but as something to be found wherever they happen to find themselves. The first rule of Buddhism, which lies at the heart of Japan's ancient rites and assumptions, is the reality of suffering (which means that anything other than suffering is an unexpected luxury). The second rule is impermanence, which in this context translates into taking the long view of things. The economic forecast calls for overcast skies, I hear my neighbors saying, but that can only change at some point, and in the meantime Japan has the second-largest economy in the world and unparalleled private savings. Besides, a rainy day allows you to do things you would never think to do when the sun is out.

To live in a culture not your own means learning a different language—not so much in the sense of mastering foreign words but of rethinking the English you thought you knew. In Japan, "denial" seems to mean denying a despair that can be of use to no one, while "repression" means repressing the impulse to put your own circumstances before everyone else's. "Fatalism" is just a less happy word for faith. Often I'm reminded of the people I know in my native England who tell me that the country enjoyed its finest hour during the Blitz, when it was drawn together by adversity and learned that putting a brave face on things was the best way of passing the hopefulness around—and the first step toward making the hopefulness come true.

The department store down the street from me closed last week, and the people around me say, "Who knows what will come in its place—maybe something better?" Living abroad, I might have called that wishfulness. Coming to Japan, I've learned to call it realism.